It was getting terribly commonplace now.
“Indeed I have not,” he replied. “How could I help feeling hurt when I saw you as I did with that horse-jockey foot-racing animal?”
“You might have known that I had a reason for it, and that I was behaving so on behalf of my friend,” said Lucy.
“How was I to be able to analyse the secrets of your heart?” said Oldroyd, romantically.
“Then you looked insultingly at me just now, when dear old grandfatherly Major Day spoke to me, and behaved to me as he did. Why—oh, I haven’t patience with myself for speaking about it all as I do. It is degrading and weak; and what right, sir,” she panted, “have you to ask me for such explanations?”
“I do it in all humbleness, Lucy,” he whispered, with his voice softening. “I have nothing to say in my defence, only that I love you so dearly that it cuts me to the heart to think that—that—oh, my darling, look at me like that again.”
It was all in a moment. Lucy’s eyes had ceased to flash, and had darted out such a confession of forgiveness, and love, and tenderness, all mingled, as made Oldroyd forget all about the laws of equitation, and fall off his pony on the wrong side, to catch Lucy’s hand in his and draw it tightly through his arm.
Peter began to nibble placidly at shoots, and everything was more commonplace than ever, for they walked slowly along by the roadside, with their heads down, perfectly silent; while the pony browsed along, with his head down, and the rein dragging on the ground, till after a bit he trod upon it, gave his head a snatch at the check, and broke it, making it very little worse than it was before.
And so they went on, with the larks singing overhead, the grass and daisies springing beneath their feet, and the world looking more beautiful than it ever did before; what time Glynne was sitting, pale, large-eyed, and thin, in her own room, reading hard—some heavy work, which she jealously placed aside whenever she had finished perusing; and Moray Alleyne was alone in his observatory, gaunt, grey, and strange, busy over the calculations respecting the star he had been watching for nights past, that bright particular star that seemed somehow connected with the woman he had ventured to love.
“Are you very angry, Mrs Alleyne?” said Oldroyd, as he took Lucy’s hand in his and walked with her to where the mistress of The Firs was seated, busily stitching, in the very perfection of neatness, the pleats of a new garment for her son.